Equals Group PLC
Head of Payment & Banking Operations
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About Equals
Equals is the next-generation global money movement platform built for exceptional businesses operating across borders. We bring international payments, embedded finance, and more together into a single connection that simplifies operations and strengthens financial control. With deep expertise and integrated infrastructure, Equals turns financial complexity into reliable solutions. With our headquarters in London and teams around the UK and Europe, you will join a very close-knit, talented and supportive team from various backgrounds who believe that bringing different perspectives together helps us understand our customers' needs. United, by one thing, making money management straightforward and cost-effective for our customers.
About the role
Every pound that moves across the Equals platform passes through Payment & Banking Operations. This role owns the operational engine behind it: collections and funding land, FX settles clean, books are reconciled every day, every payment finds its route and arrives, and when one goes wrong we know first, say so first, and fix it before it hurts the customer.
The Head of Payment & Banking Operations leads a multi-disciplinary desk across settlement and scheme processing, reconciliation, payment investigations and exceptions, scheme and banking-partner operations and processor operations. The role is the senior operational owner of payment reliability, the first-line control environment for payments, and the relationships with the schemes, banks and processors that give Equals its reach.
It also carries a commercial mandate: processing cost per transaction falling as volume grows. That means scaling the desk through automation rather than headcount — reconciliation matched by machine with people on the breaks, payment status published rather than investigated, and every failure fed back to the platform so the cause is fixed, not the symptom. One line never moves: no human being releases funds alone.
Responsibilities
- Settlement and scheme processing: Own daily processing across all rails — Faster Payments, CHAPS, Bacs, SEPA, SWIFT and schemes — including cutoff management by corridor and scheme, funding execution against the treasury interface, and maker-checker release on every payment.
- Reconciliation: Own the reconciliation control end to end: books right every business day, matching automated, breaks owned to root cause, ageing visible per queue, and evidence ready for internal and external audit.
- Investigations and exceptions: Run the payment investigations desk — tracing, recalls, amendments, beneficiary claims and requests to partner banks — as a managed case queue with SLAs, ageing MI and live status shared with the customer-facing teams.
- Scheme compliance and banking-partner operations: Own the scheme mandate calendar and its on-time delivery, scheme attestations and operational compliance, release-bulletin review with Technology, and day-to-day operational liaison with nostro providers, banking partners and schemes.
- Recovery execution: Execute recalls, freezes and reimbursement money movement for the Fraud & Disputes team inside agreed windows, confirming back every time. They decide; this team moves the money.
- Payment status and enquiry reduction: Publish live payment status to customer channels and to Customer Service so "where is my money" stops being a question, reducing the enquiry rate at source.
- Unit cost: Own processing cost per transaction by rail: establish the internal baseline, report it, and drive it down as volume grows by putting automation ahead of headcount.
- Automation and AI: Lead the desk's automation roadmap — reconciliation platform, exception triage, payment tracking feeds, structured investigation rails — within clear guardrails: automation proposes, people approve every money-moving decision.
- Incident management and resilience: Run the on-call and incident rota for payments, lead root-cause analysis, and ensure proactive notification to key clients and partners before they notice a failure. Maintain access governance and depth of cover so no critical banking or scheme platform depends on one person.
- First-line controls: Own the payments control environment: maker-checker in every workflow, break write-off within mandate, control MI to governance, and a credible interface with second line, internal audit and external auditors.
- Platform feedback: Turn STP failures, repair reasons and break causes into structured requirements for Technology and Product so the platform removes the cause, not the queue.
- Operating cadence: Run the weekly review of the desk's numbers — payment success by corridor, STP, instant/same-day share, break ageing, investigation cycle time, mandate delivery, unit cost and incidents — with actions owned to closure.
- People: Build and lead the team to one bar across four leads: clear standards, cross-training for resilience across settlement, reconciliation, investigations, scheme and card operations, fast coaching, and decisive action when the standard is not met.
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Accountabilities
- Payment success rate and % instant/same-day, by corridor and scheme.
- Straight-through processing rate, trending above 90%.
- Reconciliation complete every business day; break ageing zero beyond threshold; clean audit.
- Investigation cycle time and enquiry rate, both beating industry baselines and falling.
- Scheme mandates delivered on time, attestations clean, zero scheme breaches, partner and nostro relationships in good standing.
- Processing cost per transaction by rail: baseline published and falling as volume grows.
- Payment incidents inside tolerance; zero customer-detected-first P1s as the ambition.
- Automation coverage: auto-match share and exception-triage coverage, with human release untouched.
- Team quality: hiring bar, cross-training depth, no single point of failure on any critical system.
In the operating model
What good looks like
Payments just work, at a success rate customers never think about and a unit cost that falls as volume climbs. Books are right every day without anyone matching by hand. Payment status answers itself. When something goes wrong, we usually know first, say so first, and fix it before it hurts. Schemes and partners rate Equals their cleanest operational counterparty, and no human being ever releases funds alone.
Key relationships
- Customer Service — live payment status and investigation visibility both ways; they keep the customer, this team works the case.
- Fraud & Disputes — the recovery runbook; they decide, this team executes and confirms.
- Financial Crime — their screening gate sits inside this team's payment flow.
- Technology & Product — rails, processor and reconciliation tooling; this team owns operational configuration and exception queues, not the build.
- Finance — month-end close and the write-off mandate.
- Treasury — see boundaries below.
- Schemes, banks and processors — the external relationships the desk runs on.
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Twelve-month objectives
- Keep payments reliable — success rate and instant/same-day share at or above target by corridor, reviewed weekly; STP above 90%.
- Books right every day — reconciliation complete daily, break ageing zero beyond threshold, clean annual audit.
- Kill the enquiry — live payment status published to customer channels; enquiry rate and investigation cycle time both below industry baseline.
- Hold scheme and partner standing — 100% of mandates on time, attestations clean, zero breaches.
- Drive unit cost down — processing cost per transaction baselined by rail and falling year on year while volume grows.
- Automate the routine, keep the button human — reconciliation platform live, exception-triage automation delivered with maker-checker retained.
- Run resilient — incidents inside tolerance, incident rota formalised, access matrix current with depth of cover on every critical platform.
Role boundaries
- Treasury and funding — open interface, decision pending. Peers split cleanly: some put daily funding, liquidity positioning and nostro management inside payment operations (Revolut, Modulr, Argentex); others keep treasury as a sibling desk next to dealing (Wise, Airwallex, Ebury). This JD is written to the settlement interface. If the decision lands inside, add daily funding and liquidity to Responsibilities and re-grade (see salary appendix, Level 3). Decide before advertising.
- Payments Assurance & Control Lead — adjacent, not within. External scheme representation (Pay.UK, Faster Payments forums), the annual assurance and attestation cycle, operational resilience reporting and access/SPOF governance ownership sit with the Payments Assurance & Control Lead in Operational Excellence. This role runs the controls and supplies the evidence; the Assurance Lead assures and represents.
- Platform build sits with Technology & Product, including card product and integrations. This role sets requirements and owns quality acceptance; no automation goes live on this desk's work without passing its acceptance standard.
- Decisions that belong elsewhere: fraud recovery decisions (Fraud & Disputes), screening decisions (Financial Crime), dealing (Commercial), second-line oversight (Compliance/MLRO).
- SM&CR. Not currently an SMF or certified role — SM&CR does not apply to firms authorised only under the PSRs/EMRs. HM Treasury's July 2026 consultation on senior-manager accountability for PIs/EMIs (closes 6 Oct 2026) may change this.
Essential Skills
- A proven, evidenced track record leading payment operations, settlement or banking operations in a regulated payments, e-money or fintech business — typically 7+ years in payments with 3+ years managing managers — with the numbers to prove it: success rates, STP, break rates, cycle times.
- Hands-on depth in UK and international rails: Faster Payments, CHAPS, Bacs, SEPA, SWIFT (including gpi tracking and investigations) and card scheme settlement, and the cutoffs, mandates and attestations that come with them.
- Has owned a reconciliation control to a daily standard and evidenced it to auditors; designs the control, not just follows it.
- Has scaled an operations team through automation rather than headcount — reconciliation platforms, exception tooling, status publication — while keeping every money
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